Rethinking our high school education system

The headlines scream "dropout rates rise" and "state budget sinks" while letters on The Oregonian's commentary page show citizens' frustration at a public education system that seemingly fails in the race to the top. Since I began teaching high school in 1993, the essential story line hasn't changed. In the early '90s, schools were trying to balance Measure 5, which reduced funding, and then-legislator Vera Katz's Education for the Twenty-first Century Act, which increased academic expectations. For an entire generation, "do more with less" has been the story of public education.

Addressing today's headlines will require changes more fundamental than teacher evaluations, merit pay and better management practices; equipping our youth for maturity will require a re-evaluation of what schools teach and the standards for earning a high school diploma.

Along with higher expectations and reduced budgets, schools face increasing inequality in society, which no serious discussion of public education can ignore. In examining school reform, we must look beyond students' academic readiness for college to broader measures of inequality. These include health inequality, where poor students are more likely to be obese and suffer from attendant poor health. They include moral inequality, where a disproportionate numbers of poor boys are suspended and expelled from school and eventually land in jail. And they include an emotional gap born of single-parent families that can not provide the emotional guidance and nurturing that two-parent families did in previous times.

In light of such inequalities, using college readiness as the sole target of public education misses students' real needs for physical, moral and social development at school. That our current secondary education curriculum misses our kids' real needs is amply demonstrated by a recent report ("Ready, Willing, and Unable to Serve"), which found that only 25 percent of our 17- to 24-year-olds were fit to serve in the military. For example, 5 percent are morally unfit because they have criminal records, 18 percent are emotionally unfit due to substance abuse or mental health issues, and an amazing 35 percent are unfit due to obesity and other medical or physical limitations. By contrast, only 10 percent are deemed unqualified for intellectual or cognitive deficiencies. If our schools graduate kids who are unhealthy, unhappy and unable to form positive relationships with others, we have bigger problems than low SAT scores.

So what can we do about it? Consider health. We all know we can't afford our ill health. Why are we not insisting on good health and the habits that maintain it be a graduation requirement for high school? We require four years of high school English instruction and only one of physical education. Does society need better five-paragraph essays discussing William Faulkner or young citizens in better health? We have put a lot of emphasis on Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate programs that move college curriculum into our high schools, but maybe we should have less AP and more councilors to help young people navigate adolescence. Maybe the school day should be longer, with rich opportunities for play, socialization, nonacademic work and academic help when needed?

I don't know all the answers, but until public school standards are expanded to address the real needs of an increasingly unequal society, I think we are setting ourselves up for more failure and an ever-widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. David Lickey of Northeast Portland teaches advanced placement U.S. and European history at Grant High School.